The New York Times over the weekend published a book review about the Iraq war, called "The War on Error." The book is highly critical of the way the Bush administration planned and managed the Iraq war. What makes the book unique is that the author, Charles Ferguson, supported the war when it began in 2003. It's now 2008 and the war is raging on. The review only confirms what many of us have been saying for quite some time: the collosal disaster that is the Iraq war represents what has to be the greatest policy disaster of our lifetimes.

According to the review, the book in part talks about the logistical failures of the war.

No End in Sight” reads like a primer on incompetence, a catalog of bungling. “There were 500 ways to do it wrong, and two or three ways to do it right,” Bodine tells Ferguson. “What we didn’t understand is that we were gonna go through all 500.”

Doing it wrong started with the looting. This wasn’t a matter of thieves walking off with toasters and television sets. What happened in Baghdad was of an entirely different magnitude, a descent into nihilism that lasted for weeks, even months. Stores, schools, hospitals were destroyed; at least 16 of 23 government ministries were gutted. Organized criminals brought in industrial cranes to haul off parts of a power plant. Yet the instructions from Washington were not to interfere. “Freedom’s untidy,” Rumsfeld intoned. The result was a loss of Iraqi trust that has never been regained.

But the book highlights a larger problem. According to many experts who don't like the war, we cannot simply pull out all the troops:

And if the Americans withdraw? Most of the people Ferguson talked to believe the result would be full-scale civil war; one analyst speaks of three or four civil wars at once. Even some of those who favor withdrawal accept the likelihood of a blood bath. “You would see the Sunnis of Baghdad certainly getting finished off quick,” says one. Another, an American specialist on democracy and development obviously wearied by Iraq, says the mere threat of withdrawal might bring the rival factions together, but if not, “they can have their civil war.”

It’s not that simple, however. A bloody civil war, several experts observe, probably would not be limited to Iraq. Neighboring countries would almost inevitably be drawn in, and the entire region could be engulfed in chaos. Iran would support the Shiites, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan and possibly Egypt would back the Sunnis. Turkey, meanwhile, might become more deeply enmeshed in Iraq’s Kurdish areas. Juan Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, was an influential opponent of the war who now opposes a pullout. He’s not the only one. Cole points out that a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia could endanger the world’s oil supplies. “Iraq is not like Vietnam, where the U.S. could withdraw precipitately and altogether and let the chips fall where they may. ... The U.S. has destabilized the cockpit of the world economy. The plane is now spiraling down.”

This country f*cked up the Iraq war so badly that our withdrawal could ignite the Middle East, creating a cataclysmic fire straight from the Bible. I'm no military expert, so I can't say what to do about the war at this point. But basic principles of accountability make it clear in my mind what should happen. You don't screw up a policy initiative without being held accountable. If you erase your company's entire hard drive by accident, you get fired. If you try to burn your school to the ground, you get expelled. If you commit a crime, you go to jail. If you start a bogus war that kills 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, flushes hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilet and makes this country less safe by creating more and more terrorists, here's what should happen: you should be dragged from the White House, put on trial for war crimes and impeached.